Lee Wells is an artist, exhibition organizer and consultant currently living and working New York. His artwork primarily questions systems of power and control and has been exhibited internationally including the 51 st La Biennale Di Venezia, Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinatti and the Museo d'arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. He is a co-founder and director of IFAC-arts, http://www.ifac-arts.org, an alternative exhibition and installation program for artists and curators.His artwork, projects and exhibitions have been written about by various national and international art and news publications to include: The New York Times, Art Newspaper, The Washington Post, Art in America, and Art Net.

Wells is currently a curator at large and Cinema-Scope director for Scope Art Fairs http://www.scope-art.com. In January 2006, he co-founded the video art community research portal and traveling installation [PAM] http://PerpetualArtMachine.com, with the artists Raphaele Shirley, Chris Borkowski and Aaron Miller.Wells has been participating on the Rhizome since 1998.

GylleSMS ("ManureSMS") is a new Danish SMS service designed to optimize the relationship between farmers and their neighbours.

The popular service enable farmers to send their neighbours an SMS containing information about where and when they are spreading manure (the smelly fertilizer stuff that can spoil a beautiful day at the countryside).

The service-friendly farmers are now pondering whether to extend the service to include a voting system that allow neighbours to have a say about when the farmers should/shouldn't fertilize their fields.

Jan Chipchase is Principal Researcher in the User Experience Group of Nokia Research Center. A part of his fascinating job is to observe and describe how different cultures use mobile technologies differently - often in ways unintended or unpredicted by the industry that he represents. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork around the world, such as in Uganda where access to electricity and mobile phones is limited and the user need thus quite basic.

As a consequence of these limitations, people have developed an alternative solutions and service economies, such as phone-sharing systems and battery-charging services (photo) where batteries can be recharged for a relatively small price.

Documentation of this and other of Jan Chipchase's interesting findings are available for download at Nokia Research Center.

Poetics of Cinema + Narrativity

Poetics of Cinema 2 by Raoul Ruiz
Eleven years separate these lines from the first part of my Poetics of Cinema. Meanwhile the world has changed and cinema with it. Poetics of Cinema, 1 had much of a call to arms about it. What I write today is rather more of a consolatio philosophica. However, let no one be mistaken about this, a healthy pessimism may be better than a suicidal optimism. Following his research in Poetics of Cinema, 1 on new narrative models as tools for apprehending a fast-shifting world, Raul Ruiz with Poetics of Cinema 2 makes an appeal for an entirely new way of filming, writing, and of conceiving the image. Read more >>

Narrativity: How Visual Arts, Cinema and Literature are Telling the World Today by Audet Ren, Romano Claude, Dreyfus Laurence, Therrien Carl, Marchal Hugues: To tackle the question of narration in its ruptures and mutations in an age of media culture and influences of video where the ludic and interactive principle is an important element is a way to draw up an inventory of the Nineties, a time when art starts to function like some kind of editing table on which the artists can recreate daily reality. Through that reflection on time, the question is to show how its new languages and new ways of writing are representative of the contemporary imaginary expressed in it and to reaffirm that the work of art is an event before being a monument or a mere testimony, an event which constitutes an experience drawing in the spectator. Read more >>

The first comprehensive, historical exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution focuses on the crucial period 1965 to 1980, during which the majority of feminist activism and artmaking occurred internationally. The exhibition includes the work of 119 artists from the United States, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Comprising work in a broad range of media including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and performance art the exhibition is organized around themes based on media, geography, formal concerns, collective aesthetic, and political impulses. Curated for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), the exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

IMAGE: Berwick Street Film Collective, still from Nightcleaners, 1970-1975, Film, Courtesy of LUX

Wilderness Trouble V1.0, 2007 (9.2MB)
http://www.restlessculture.net/mov/wildernesstroublev1_web.mov
A Quicktime video and DVD, inspired by William Cronon’s article entitled “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” This article, which was critical to ecocriticism’s recent shift from deep to social ecological models, argues that the concept of “wilderness” has no basis in nature but is a historical and cultural construction. Cronon points out that the U.S. preoccupation with conserving “natural” spaces untouched by humans was a guise of American colonialism (throwing indigenous people off their land to make national parks), and his concern is that it fails today to imagine new, healthy, and sustainable relationships between humans and their environments. This meditational DV attempts to add a consideration of the digital to this reevaluation of wilderness—by refusing to separate modern human life from relatively “natural” environments and by thinking about nature and the digital technologies that make this work possible in the same frame.

Quicktime documentary of an installation at the intersection of artist-curation and collaboration. Initiated by Cary Peppermint, this project included sound-art works from over thirty international artists. WildInfoNet encouraged artists to create sound works in the “voice” of ecological other, or to make works in which the artists’ considered themselves as human animal; beings within “nature” producing sound for unknowable others. The project was located 173 miles northwest of NYC, in the Catskill mountains of New York state, Hikers to the back-woods installation used wireless technologies and transistor radios to receive the information-art via .mp3 downloads and radio transmissions. This documentary is featured on DVD ...

Peanut Underground is proud to present “Pirate States” at the 1st Mykonos Biennale.

The avant-garde has returned. A new supermodern aesthetic is here: a new awareness formed in wake of cultural post-traumatic stress, institutional corruption, and postmodern complacency. All these crises are caused by a general disrespect for new ideas. Time is marching on.

The Pirate States are geographically located between hyperreality and the glitch, in the slipstream of the spectacle. Descending from the Cloud, art exists as actual and potential energy, as performance, as memory. It does not ask to be understood, only to be freed.

These artists create work with no fixed shape or location: nomadic artifacts that jump the rails of the global surveillance state. The avant-garde is on the attack.

We are flash mobs and creative insurgencies, kitenic undergrounds with virile digitalia. Armed with new ideas coming from deep space, ancient myth and Antarctica, artists now engage in a borderless discourse unpredictably more complicated than ever before. Necessity demands new forms.

Godard said, “The so-called ‘digital’ is not a mere technical medium, but a medium of thought. And when modern democracies turn technical thought into a separate domain, those modern democracies incline towards totalitarianism.”

Jorn said, “The avant-garde doesn’t give up.”

The avant-garde is essential to our survival. What will emerge is left open. We are. It is.

Crisis and Paganism addresses the failures of global capitalism in the 21st century, as manifested by the current economic crisis in Greece and its overall effects on networked society. But as we acknowledge the pending collapse of corrupt capitalist systems, we celebrate the infinite spirit of creation. We call out to the ancient gods for new knowledge and inspiration, and to grant us the vision and fortitude to free ourselves from all forms of repression and austerity. The festival strives to cultivate a fresh energy, through the creative convergence of artists and thinkers, in the hopes of reflecting a new positive light back into the world.

The First Mykonos Biennale is an artist-run, avant-garde festival of new media, film and art. Opening on the Summer Solstice, the Biennale brings over 100 international artists to the ancient islands of Mykonos and Delos, Greece to present their work and address this year’s theme, “Crisis and Paganism.“

Rooster Gallery Contemporary Art presents “Action For Freedom: New Works by Lee Wells”, featuring new video action paintings from the “Soul Series.” with a catalog essay by Lara Pan.Opening Reception Thursday February 17th, 2011 - 6-9 pmLee Wells (born 1971), offers a complex intermix of images, which engage issues of war, sexuality, freedom and liberation. Deeply rooted in the history of painting and dialogue of the Avant-garde, “Action For Freedom,” presents portraits of humanity as an attempt to create order within the chaos, confusion and wonder of the early 21st century.Wells juxtaposes two distinct bodies of work in the upper and lower galleries at Rooster Gallery. Taken together, the discursive spectacle of global cultural implosion on the collective psyche is exposed for our super-modern era. Wells’ immersive high definition works for “Video Forest” are currently on view through 2014 at the Kimpo International Airport, Seoul, Korea, and was recently was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum to write the essay Andy, Nam June, and Me at the Zoo, which discusses the video and the Avant-garde in the post 9-11 era.Lee Wells, whose artwork and projects primarily question systems of power and control, has exhibited internationally for over 15 years, including the 51st Venice Biennial; PS1/MoMA, New York, NY; the National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; WRO07 XI Media Biennial, Warsaw, Poland; the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center; and The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia; in addition to numerous art fairs, festivals and universities.

In its totality, “Action for Freedom” presents a timely visual discussion about the heroes, victims and martyrs of the 21st century.New York, February 2011

A Light at the End of the Tunnel is an epic video art trilogy about the human condition, including seminal works by 30 international emerging artists chosen based on an open call from over 200 submissions.

Why are we here? What does it all mean? How is it all relative to art in the 21st century?

Above image still by Den Marino (Russia), The Illustration of Life, 2009

About the CuratorLee Wells is an artist, independent curator and consultant currently living and working in New York. His artwork and projects primarily question systems of power and control and have been exhibited internationally for over 15 years, including the 51 st La Biennale Di Venezia, National Center for Contemporary Art Moscow, Kimpo International Airport, WRO07 XII Media Biennial, PS1/MoMA, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, and Hermitage Museum in addition to numerous art fairs, festivals and galleries. He is a co-founder and director of IFAC-arts, an alternative curitorial program and nomadic gallery and since 2006, a co-founder of [PAM] the Perpetual Art Machine and has been a SCOPE Curator at Large since 2005. www.leewells.org

About SCOPE FoundationSCOPE’S continued mission is to turn viewers into users. Since 2007, SCOPE International Art Fair is proud to announce the launch of the SCOPE Foundation, whose mandate is to help emerging contemporary artists, through grants, awards, and acquisitions. SCOPE is dedicated to not only supporting the international emerging artistic community, but local schools and not-for-profit arts institutions. www.scope-art.comAbout Babelgum.comA free, revolutionary Internet and Mobile TV platform supported by advertising, Babelgum combines the full-screen video quality of traditional television with the interactive capabilities of the Internet and offers professionally produced programming on-demand to a global audience. Founded in 2005, Babelgum's goal is to act as an international 'glue', bringing a huge range of professional and semi-professional content to a global audience - like a modern-day Tower of Babel. The bubble logo is a fun visual pun on the company name, but also reflects Babelgum's commitment to a green, global future.www.babelgum.com

The Chelsea Art Museum is pleased to present 0910 Light Shots by Raphaele Shirley, a site-specific multi-media artwork for The Project Room for New Media. In this new work Raphaele displays her dexterity in use of diverse mediums and materials such as light, fog, sensors and mirrors by which she carves ephemeral sculptures in time and space, re-evaluating elemental yet elusive aspects of the world around us.

0910 Light Shots is a continuation of her light based multi-media work such as Jewels of Kvinesdal in Norway (2009) and Shooting Stair (2009) published by Dorfman Projects in NY. In these recent works Raphaele mingles the spatial clarity and structure of minimalism with the dynamic and virtual qualities of new media and technology. Using light beams to draw lines and planes in space, she constructs both the visible evidence of basic geometry and the invisible and undefined structures of space into which these exist and extend. The piece created for the Project Room for New Media will be at once a site-specific ephemeral object and an interactive installation; the composition evolving in color and perspective according to the viewer’s position within. The electric presence of this irradiant sculpture takes root in basic physics, creating an arrestingly essential visual space and an environment for contemplation and reflection, whilst underlining primary phenomena intrinsic to our surroundings and exploring principles of perception.